While working on my paper for the Deleuze Studies conference next week, I have finally had some time to dig back in to some of the material that has inspired me. I find this notion of the plan(e) of organization especially helpful because it makes room to explore forms and subjects, the former of which include buildings, spaces, discourses in my conception of SLU, and the latter of which includes those who are “becoming-urban” in the way that Vulcan suggests when they say:

Here’s a short excerpt from my paper that I think will guide me for some time:

On their website, Vulcan claims that their “role is not the usual one between a developer and a neighborhood. While most developers are content to build and move on, Vulcan has and will remain involved in the South Lake Union neighborhood for decades to come.” As the primary force of development in the neighborhood – a role Vulcan took on after public voters twice rejected proposals for a sixty-acre central park – the Seattle Commons – flanked by bio- and high-technology companies and connecting downtown to the shores of Lake Union – I understand Vulcan as enacting a particular urbanism, or a plan(e) of organization: this is the central notion of my entire understanding and approach to the neighborhood. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that such a plane “cannot be given as such,” and that it “can only be inferred from the forms it develops and the subjects it forms, since it is for these forms and these subjects” (266). For them, this plane is transcendent – it operates as a force external to the singularities and intensities that constitute reality; it strives to order, manage, and direct individual flows. This plane functions “as a transcendent unity or hidden principle” and in the case of SLU, it is the hidden principles of the guiding urbanism that I want to uncover.